Public Preview: Azure Operational Insights

12 November 2014

Operational Insights is a software as a service (SaaS) that is tailored for IT operations teams. This service leverages the power of Azure HDInsight to glean machine data across environments and turn the data into real-time operational intelligence to enable better-informed business decisions. Operational Insights provides powerful search capabilities that enable ad hoc root cause analysis and automated troubleshooting across multiple data sources. Without instrumenting any code directly or having knowledge of any complex schema, IT administrators quickly receive interactive results. Operational Insights search allows customers to drill deeper into areas of interest that are highlighted by prepackaged Intelligence Packs. Search also enables customers to form hypotheses and query data to find custom insights through proactive exploration or reactive troubleshooting. Operational Insights provides proactive operational data analysis through the delivery of Intelligence Packs. Intelligence Packs can be selected from an integrated gallery. They offer prebuilt rules and algorithms that perform the initial analysis for critical scenarios, such as capacity planning, configuration intelligence, and change tracking. Microsoft provides these Intelligence Packs based on learnings gathered from operating cloud-scale datacenters. Intelligence Packs allow customers to apply Microsoft-authored patterns to their data to accelerate the time to first insight. Capacity planning: Get deep visibility into your datacenter capacity, pinpoint capacity shortages, investigate "what-if" scenarios, identify stale and overallocated virtual machines, and plan future compute and storage needs for your infrastructure. Update status: Identify missing system updates across all of your servers, whether they’re running in your datacenter or in a public cloud. Now you can know which of your servers have the latest updates, and which need them. Additional examples include configuration, security, and malware assessment. As an Azure-based service, Operational Insights provides an easy add-on to all Azure, Windows Server, and System Center customers. It has support for reading from an Azure Storage account for events and IIS logs for web roles without installing an agent. It also provides the ability to install an agent on Azure virtual machines for in-depth analysis from IPs. The service is offered in three tiers: Free, Standard, and Premium. The Free tier has a limit on the amount of data ingested daily, and it has a seven-day data-retention period. The Standard and Premium tiers do not have a limit on the amount of data ingested daily, and they have greater data-retention periods. To learn more about this new release and how you can sign up, see Operational Insights.